Smacking a child in a supermarket (posed by model).
Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

France has been plunged into a heated debate on smacking as Europe’s human rights watchdog prepares to publish strong criticism of the country’s failure to explicitly ban the corporal punishment of children.

The Council of Europe judgment expected on Wednesday will find French law is not “sufficiently clear, binding and precise” on the issue of hitting children, according to leaks to Le Monde.

While France bans violence towards children, it allows parents the “right to discipline” their children.

In recent years, MPs from both right and left have unsuccessfully attempted to amend the law and introduce a smacking ban. But no government has supported a ban, with many politicians nervous about offending parents.

Successive polls have shown a large majority of French people opposes any ban on smacking.

Commenting on the Council of Europe’s criticism, the socialist family minister Laurence Rossignol said there was no need to pass a law against smacking. “We don’t need a law but we do need to collectively consider the usefulness of corporal punishment in bringing up children,” she told Agence France-Presse.

She added that she was personally in favour of raising kids without violence, but did not want to “split the country into two camps, for and against spanking”.

Children who had never been hit were the best brought up, and better at listening to adults and their authority

Edwige Antier

Gilles Lazimi, a GP and coordinator of an anti-smacking campaign by the Fondation pour l’enfance, said that in France – where many adults were smacked in childhood and where rhymes in favour of smacking still stick in the collective memory – there was a fundamental difficulty in getting the law changed.

He said: “Politicians have shown a major lack of courage on this. We’re supposed to be the country of the Rights of Man and we can’t even respect the rights of children. Studies have shown that 50% of French parents hit their children before the age of two. There is an atmosphere in France whereby children are somehow seen as dangerous things that need to be trained and made obedient.

“Politicians are tied to a kind of family politics where the rights of the parents are more important than the rights of the children. It’s incredible. But the fact that the minister has now said there should be a collective consideration of the issue shows at least there has been a change of view by her and that she has heard us on the risks and the consequences of smacking.”

In a TV news debate, Thierry Vidor, of the family association Familles de France, said smacking was different to violence against children and a smack was “sometimes an act of love” by parents.

One poll in 2007 found that 87% of French parents had spanked their children. In 2010, during Nicolas Sarkozy’s presidency, the paediatrician and rightwing MP Edwige Antier tried unsuccessfully to get the law changed to ban smacking, saying that “in 38 years of professional practice, the children who had never been hit were the best brought up, and better at listening to adults and their authority”.

In 2013, a court in Limoges fined a father €500 (£364) for pulling his nine-year-old son’s pants down and spanking him. The father argued that his son had been sulking for days and would not say hello to him. The judge ruled that it was an act of violence against a child and a humiliation.

Last year, Green MPs filed an amendment to a family law in the hope of banning smacking, but withdrew it when François Hollande’s socialist government, still on edge after the massive street protests against its legalisation of gay marriage, promised to raise the issue as part of a different parliamentary text. But despite that promise, the socialists have not sought to return to the issue.

Reacting to the Council of Europe criticism of France, Pierre Laurent of the Communist party said smacking was “a totally marginal subject. Europe has much better things to be busying itself with”.

Luc Chatel, of the rightwing Union for a Popular Movement party (UMP) and Nicolas Sarkozy’s former education minister, said spanking should be like “nuclear dissuasion” – a weapon that “dissuades and is never used”.